The Pilgrim, and the American of Today | Page 6

power in irresponsible hands, we see a new cause for alarm in undue
federal mastery and interference. This we can only resist by the
constant assertion of the rights, the power, the dignity of the individual
State, all that it has not surrendered in the fundamental constitution of
the Republic. This means the full weight of the State, as a State, as a
political unit, in the election of President; and the full weight of the
State, as a State, as a political unit, without regard to its population, in
the senate of the United States. The senate, as it stands, as it was meant
to be in the Constitution, is the strongest safeguard which the
fundamental law established against centralization, against the tyranny
of mere majorities, against the destruction of liberty, in such a diversity
of climates and conditions as we have in our vast continent. It is not a
mere check upon hasty legislation; like some second chambers in
Europe, it is the representative of powers whose preservation in their
dignity is essential to the preservation of the form of our government
itself.
We pursue the same distribution of power and responsibility when we
pass to the States. The federal government is not to interfere in what the
State can do and ought to do for itself; the State is not to meddle with

what the county can best do for itself; nor the county in the affairs best
administered by the town and the municipality. And so we come to the
individual citizen. He cannot delegate his responsibility. The
government even of the smallest community must be, at least is, run by
parties and by party machinery. But if he wants good government, he
must pay as careful attention to the machinery,--call it caucus, primary,
convention, town-meeting,--as he does to the machinery of his own
business. If he hands it over to bosses, who make politics a trade for
their own livelihood, he will find himself in the condition of
stockholders of a bank whose directors are mere dummies, when some
day the cashier packs the assets and goes on a foreign journey for his
health. When the citizen simply does his duty in the place where he
stands, the boss will be eliminated, in the nation, in the State, in the
town, and we shall have, what by courtesy we say we have now, a
government by the people. Then all the way down from the capital to
the city ward, we shall have vital popular government, free action,
discussion, agitation, life. What an anomaly it is, that a free people,
reputed shrewd and intelligent, should intrust their most vital interests,
the making of their laws, the laying of their taxes, the spending of their
money, even their education and the management of their public
institutions, into the keeping of political bosses, whom they would not
trust to manage the least of their business affairs, nor to arbitrate on
what is called a trial of speed at an agricultural fair.
But a good government, the best government, is only an opportunity.
However vast the country may become in wealth and population, it
cannot rise in quality above the average of the majority of its citizens;
and its goodness will be tested in history by its value to the average
man, not by its bigness, not by its power, but by its adaptability to the
people governed, so as to develop the best that is in them. It is
incidental and imperative that the country should be an agreeable one to
live in; but it must be more than that, it must be favorable to the growth
of the higher life. The Puritan community of Massachusetts Bay, whose
spirit we may happily contrast with that of the Pilgrims whose
anniversary we celebrate, must have been as disagreeable to live in as
any that history records; not only were the physical conditions of life
hard, but its inquisitorial intolerance overmatched that which it escaped

in England. It was a theocratic despotism, untempered by recreation or
amusement, and repressive not only of freedom of expression but of
freedom of thought. But it had an unconquerable will, a mighty sense
of duty, a faith in God, which not only established its grip upon the
continent but carried its influence from one ocean to the other. It did
not conquer by its bigotry, by its intolerance, its cruel persecuting spirit,
but by its higher mental and spiritual stamina. These lower and baser
qualities of the age of the Puritans leave a stain upon a great
achievement; it took Massachusetts almost two centuries to cast them
off and come into a wholesome freedom, but the vital energy and the
recognition of the essential verities inhuman life carried all the
institutions of the Puritans that